So just after Mark Romanek‘s hip hop hamsters Kia ad made the rounds yesterday, here comes another slightly odd pairing of a director and a marketing campaign.

One cannot live on “Trash Humpers” alone and Harmony Korine, who is no stranger to respectable-looking ads — please see his spots for Liberty Mutual, Budweiser and the short film he made for for fashion company Proenza Schouler — has teamed with “127 Hours” and “Slumdog Millionaire” cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to create an ad for Indian megacorp Mahindra. And it’s a bit of a headscratcher even by Korine’s paycheck gig standards.

Titled “Rise” the spot is being used to help promote faceless Mahindra (who seriously have their hands in pretty much every industry you can think of) as a source of some kind of rebellious spirit (even going so far as to shamelessly use footage of the recent uprising in Egypt). As much as the ad doesn’t quite work, and is transparently manipulative, it’s actually pretty beautifully shot, no doubt thanks to Mantle’s efforts. Anyway, it’s yet another odd detour from the always hard-to-pin-down Korine, who has a couple of other projects on the go right now including a kids-in-bike-gangs project with James Franco and a motivational speaker pic with Val Kilmer. [AdWeek via Ray Pride]